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The possible paradox in the term writing without letters has not overtroubled western epistemology. But if a script cannot be shown ultimately to depend on the spoken word, the logos both Greek and biblical, then does it really deserve the name? Although they may concede a certain space to semasiography (the phase in writing in which a sketch conveys the direct likeness of an idea), today computational and other contemporary theorists effectively reiterate the “no” pronounced by the teleologues of more than a century ago, among them Karl Marx and E. B. Tylor, who posited a phonetic ingredient as indispensable to true writing.1 This is certainly the case with the SLU (small linguistic unit) and ORL (orthographically relevant level) of Richard Sproat’s computational theory of writing systems.2 Insistence on the phonetic much diminishes in principle the theoretical reach of graphic and nonspoken language systems and therefore has major consequences for our efforts to understand writing as visual language in which speech is dispensable or derivative. It blinkers the capacity to “read” in the fullest literary sense, as Ezra Pound’s involvement with Chinese script famously exemplifies. Moreover, the phonetic constraint can be shown to coincide broadly with cultural limits or limitations in the imperial west, as Jacques Derrida intimates, when disinterring the roots of (atemporal) structuralism and synchronic linguistics.3 W. C. Brice’s concentration on Cretan inscriptions no doubt encouraged him to assign nonphonetic writing to a broad sphere of symbolic expression, embracing message sticks, totemic and magical designs, and the like, “where it is exceedingly difficult , and probably pointless, to distinguish writing from graphic art.”4 It is as if, in searching for the principle of nonphonetic writing, we are bound to give up, once deprived of a phonetic crib. In practice, this limitation has gone hand in hand with a notable neglect of writing and visible/visual language in what Europe called its New World—“so new and infantine,” as Michel de Montaigne declared, “that it had yet to learn its ABC,” thus anticipating The Scripts of Ancient Mesoamerica 15 Gordon Brotherston CONTOURS OF MEANING IN THE SCRIPTS OF ANCIENT MESOAMERICA Western Epistemology and the Phonetic Issue 16 Gordon Brotherston Claude Lévi-Strauss, who came to base his structuralism on the “oral America” of Mythologiques.5 Peter Daniels’s and William Bright’s sizable 1996 account of the world’s writing systems devotes only 1 percent of its nine hundred pages to America, and that 1 percent concentrates on undoubtedly phonetic Maya hieroglyphs.6 Intelligible as sound only in lowland Maya speech, Maya hieroglyphs nonetheless belong as visual language to that part of the continent with which Lévi-Strauss was least engaged: Mesoamerica, or tropical Mexico and western Central America. Miguel León-Portilla calls this region Amoxtlalpan, or the “land of books.”7 Thus, the very definition of Mesoamerica is culturally inseparable from the making and reading of books and depends on a remarkable nonphonetic graphia franca (a shared or common script), from which Maya hieroglyphs , like other speech-specific notation (for example, Zapotec) appear to derive. In Nahuatl, or Aztec, Mesoamerica’s lingua franca when Hernando Cortés arrived, this common visual language is called tlacuilolli, which means something painted or written. It is found in several hundred scrolls and screenfold books (with accordion -like pages), which were made of paper and deerskin; in other documents produced before and after Cortés; as well as in murals and numerous stone inscriptions and petroglyphs. As a script and visual language, tlacuilolli may be said holistically to fuse into single statements what for us are the separate categories of literature, arithmetic, and picture (profile or plan). It demands or allows for various reading directions and formats: horizontal , either left or right; vertical, either up or down; linear; boustrophedon (unbroken, left to right and right to left); or circular. Each direction or function has functional and potentially ideological significance, and sometimes they are set in opposition—for example , calendar wheels may read counterclockwise toward the middle and clockwise toward the rim. Customarily, tlacuilolli texts propose multiple readings of themselves, often at successive levels of time. Tlacuilolli may introduce the phonetics of local languages if need be, yet it avoids exclusive identification with any one language , being based as ”a codified pictorial system” on a lexicon of standard concepts, saliently calendar signs, and place glyphs, which may be voiced simultaneously in various Mesoamerican tongues...

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